Miles Plumlee

Miles Plumlee
C - 6’11, 249lbs - 29 years old - 6 years of experience

Plumlee is only a Hawks player because his contract was the right size in last year’s Dwight Howard trade. It is a relationship of convenience rather than true desire, and it is that contract that will likely keep him around for a while longer, if not for its full duration.

The one good NBA season Plumlee had back in 2013-14 now looks to be a flash in the pan. As the NBA’s orthodoxy has subsequently away from Plumlee’s style of play, he is increasingly marginalised in an increasingly quick, more skilled, more perimeter-orientated NBA big man standard.

He is a big physical body, yes, but increasingly rarely does he have an opposing big physical match-up to physicate, which is a word that I just invented. He is more athletic than assumptions about him assume, yes, but it is not exactly the vertical spacing of Rudy Gobert that we are talk-ing about here. He will give a hard foul, absolutely, but often it is because he will have to because he is the one who got beaten. It is a limited offer.

With all that said, Plumlee is not without his uses. Even on this year’s edition of the Hawks, Plumlee could take on the rare-but-still-real bigger post match-ups, leaving the foul-prone and wiry Collins to play alongside him in a role more suited to his talents. Plumlee does crash the glass, particularly offensively, and he also is a solid-enough finisher at the basket who does not require touches to be happy.

With all that said, as a total non-shooter, non-creator, switching weak point and man of very limited ball skills, Plumlee is not a piece going forward. Not unless some kind of incredible skills development is about to happen in his 30s.

Player Plan: Two years at $12.5 million each remaining. Keep in much the same sort of role as this season, be prepared to use him and his contract as important filler to structure ambitiously large trade proposals, expect for that not to work, and be prepared to stretch next summer.

Miles Plumlee
C, 6’11, 249lbs, 28 years old, 5 years of experience

His mid-season addition by the Hornets was a surprise, not because Hibbert and Hawes did anything in their opportunities (nor were healthy, nor were signed long term), but because of the size of Plumlee’s con-tract, especially for a back-up ‘traditional’ centre headed towards 30. Plumlee seemed out of shape and then got injured. He sets screens, can catch and finish and does a reasonable job of contesting around the basket and cleaning the defensive glass, but offers little away from the basket on either end, has limited skill and lateral quickness, and was not nearly Zeller as a role man. It is a limited contribution for a significant pay day. Now on the Hawks, a team without an obvious starting centre, Plumlee must therefore get in shape and win the spot.

Player Plan: Three years each at $12.5 million remaining. That is a lot of money for minimal impact. Needs minutes to contribute and/or redeem value, but is looking largely like a sunken cost for next year. Was genuinely pretty solid as a limited minutes re-serve/sometime starter in the stretch from 2013-2016, but was a long way short of that last year.

[...] The lure of first-round picks is in what they can yield, not what they always do. It is well established, of course, that many first-round picks are failures relative to expectation, and this is truer the lower they are. However, first-rounders can yield star talent, star talent that has no choice but to sign with you. It can yield quality role players for basement prices, and it can yield contributors in any form you choose. Most importantly, however, first-rounders are always young and cheap. Bad teams need this to get good, and good teams need this to stay good when the market forces and punitive luxury taxes designed to break them up necessitate they cut costs. Talent is talent, but cheap, young talent is the best type of talent.

Back at the start of the summer, Utah took on a whopping $25 million in salary that it didn't want in the forms of Andris Biedrins, Richard Jefferson and Brandon Rush, purely to acquire two first-round picks and three second-round picks from the Golden State Warriors. The Jazz did this because it was more beneficial to their long-term rebuilding goal to target first-round picks, and that amount of money is now the cost of acquiring them. Or at least, it should be. First-round picks should be a valued commodity, much more than they were. Now, it seems as though they finally are.

A cursory look at the market indicates this change in philosophy. The last few deals to have included first-round picks include:


- Washington trading a pick (top-12 protected in 2014, top-10 protected through 2019, thereafter unprotected) along with Emeka Okafor in exchange for Marcin Gortat.

- Indiana trading a pick (lottery protected through 2019, thereafter unprotected) along with Miles Plumlee and Gerald Green in exchange for Luis Scola

- Boston acquiring first-rounders in all of 2014, 2016 and 2018 as a part of the Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett deal

- New Orleans acquiring Jrue Holiday and Pierre Jackson in exchange for the rights to Nerlens Noel and a 2014 first-round pick

- Toronto acquiring a 2016 first-round pick from New York -- along with two second-round picks, Steve Novak and Marcus Camby -- in exchange for Andrea Bargnani

In that list, we mostly see first-rounders traded for quality. Hall of Fame players like Pierce and Garnett, fringe All-Stars like Holiday or non-lottery picks for a legitimate starting center in Gortat. The ones where we don't see that -- the deals for Scola and Bargnani -- therefore stand out as bad deals for that reason. The inclusion of the first-round picks in each instance leaves the recipient team drastically overpaying for backup-caliber forwards. And if he's not re-signed or extended, the Gortat deal might join them.

Miles Plumlee

On assignment in the D-League last year, Plumlee averaged an inefficient 11.2 points (45% FG, 50% FT, 10.9 fgapg), alongside 10.2 points and 1.9 blocks in 30.5 minutes per game. This rather confirms what we know - Plumlee's height, strength, athleticism and very good rebounding rate translate, and the continued upwards trend in his rim protection is heartening. But every single facet of the offense needs a lot of work.

Pick 26: Unusually for them, Indiana is the next team to overvalue athleticism. They pick Miles Plumlee out of Duke, who just completed a 6.1 ppg senior season, his main offensive weapon being the alley'oop. Just like the Zellers, the oldest of the three brothers is the weakest.

In trying to be complimentary, Bilas rather trolls the pick, stating that Plumlee is only good when he doesn't think about what he's doing. A dumb Duke guy, then. Who knew.